Category: Xamarin

For various reasons I decided to write a Tic Tac Toe game in Xamarin Forms.

At the moment it supports variable board sizes, variable win line size (so it implicitly supports Gomoku) and a few custom rules like misère, a pie rule and disallowed overlines. It currently functions on Android, iOS and Windows, but is only released on Android for now.

Apart from experimenting with various features of Xamarin Forms (as well as managing Nuget packages), my goal is to try and add all the options. Features I’m planning:

TLDR: When setting the Triggers property in XAML, use the actual type of the parent tag, not a supertype.

After recently updating Xamarin Forms from 2.3.2.127 to 2.3.3.175, I started getting an InvalidOperationException: The BindableProperty "Triggers is readonly" inside InitializeComponent.

Unlike many problems, this was quite easy to track down. InitializeComponent errors are generally XAML, and in the page in question there was a single Trigger. In this case the solution was simple. The Trigger was on a custom Button type, but I was setting it specifically using Button.Triggers. Changing it to be the actual type fixed it.

Since .NET and Xamarin were open sourced, I’ve kept a casual watch on their repositories for interesting things.

Recently I noticed this pull request “Change appearance of NSTabView”. This immediately stood out since NSTabView is an AppKit (i.e. macOS) API as opposed to a UIKit (i.e iOS) API. A quick read of the details and is indeed about some difference between NSTabView and UITabBar.

The pull request is targeting the branch “macos” and it seems it’s been in development since at least August 17th.